I focus almost exclusively on PvP, whether solo, small gang, or large bloc warfare. In the past, I've been a miner, mission runner, and faction warfare jockey. I'm particularly interested in helping high-sec players get into 0.0 combat.

Monday, December 23, 2013

It’s a compound sentence, with a very simple meaning, and
when noteworthy it either leads to tremendous success or dismal failure.

This is a lesson about failure.

I took out a small fleet from our staging system in Doril on
Friday night.Having checked dotlan and
seen some action in Immensea, we headed up there.My prior experiences with the constellations
in the northwest of the map were not very positive.In each case, I was met with a massive blob
that killed me, albeit after I was able to get some kills.

Now, that usually doesn’t bother me; if I’m traveling into
their space, it’s only fair they muster everything they have to repel me.Killing someone with 14 people on the
killmail is hardly a demonstration of skill, but it does clear your space of
the threat, and sometimes that’s the only objective.

On this occasion, I happened to be flying a Vagabond, with a
Sabre, two interceptors, a Moa, and a Rapier in my fleet.As we were entering GXK-7F, our interceptor
scout reported two Taloses and a Stabber Fleet Issue on the GXK-7F gate.After debating for a moment, I put the
decision on whether we engaged to the rest of the fleet.Everyone was up for it, so we warped.The scout had to jump back through, so we
didn’t have eyes on them for a few seconds.

I told the Rapier to put a web on each Talos, and put
everyone on alert to watch broadcasts for which one we would primary.The SFI, I figured, was likely to do minimal
damage at first, but those Taloses would have to be taken out quickly.

When we landed, they had already warped off, despite our
Rapier warping cloaked.Suffice to say,
I was very disappointed.Two Taloses and
a SFI versus two Intys, a Sabre, Moa, Rapier, and Vaga would have been an
interesting fight.We’d be light on DPS,
they’d have been light on tackle and ewar.

We moved further into the constellation, expecting a fleet
to form up to fight us as we did.Our
intys tried to find some ratters to catch, but the residents were on the ball
and immediately safed up when we entered local.

Part way through, our Rapier had to go.My first mistake was in not turning back once
we lost those webs.

As we were heading back, we saw a fairly large interceptor
gang in GXK-7F on the GXK-7F gate – our exit of that constellation.Included within them was a Sabre, a Tengu,
and a Vagabond.I realized we would
struggle to take down even those three ships with our combined DPS, so I warped
us to a safe and decided to wait it out, but told everyone to align.My hope was that part of the fleet would warp
off, giving us a chance at a more balanced fight.After all, a ship in system but not on grid
does no DPS.

Seeing that their numbers were only increasing, I decided to
take the first chance we had, before even a split fleet would be far too much
for us.When their interceptors warped
off, I seized the opportunity and fleet warped us to the gate for an immediate
jump.Unsurprisingly, the Sabre and
Vagabond followed us, but the Tengu held off at first.

We MWD-aligned for the out-gate, and I called the Sabre
primary, but he quickly burned out of range.The Vagabond maintained the initial point on me until the interceptors
warped back to the gate, jumped, closed range, and gained tackle.

Let’s take a moment.The Rubicon mechanics, of course, changed interceptor warp speeds.I don’t think anyone can blame me up to this
point; a fleet that was slowly growing split, and I took advantage of the
opportunity to try to escape.But with
the new warp changes, those interceptors were able to get back into the fight
within less than a minute after warping off.Our fleet warped as slow as the Moa, so by the time we were aligning out
of the Sabre’s bubble on the other side, the interceptors were already landing
on gate.

My big mistake – and the lesson for this fight – rested in
my target calling (irony of ironies).Sure, going after the Sabre was a smart move, and switching to the
Vagabond after that made sense, but as soon as those interceptors hit the
field, I should have switched to them immediately.After my jump, I spawned favorably, in line
with my warp out, so they were between 0 and 26 km away.I had my own energy neutralizer, a Sabre, and
two interceptors on my side, so we could have bitten into the interceptors more
than we did.Sure, we probably couldn’t
clear them all, but surely killing 3-4 was a possibility.As it turned out, we only managed to take one out because of
my ham-fisted target calling.If I’d
switched us earlier, we might have even cleared tackle on one or more of us.

But the real story about this fight was one of
expectation.I expected us to have the
time to clear the Sabre off the field and burn away before that interceptor
contingent returned.Without the Sabre,
we could have chased off the Vagabond with our combined DPS.Quite simply, I had hope that we could fight
our way to freedom.

Perhaps it would have been better to have no hope at
all.Had I warped into the entire fleet,
I wouldn’t have wasted precious time shooting the Sabre or Vaga, instead going
immediately after the interceptors to help balance the isk scale and enjoy the
fight.

If warping the interceptors off was a deliberate tactic, it
was a brilliant one on the part of the enemy fleet.It dangled a chance in front of me, only to
snatch it away.Perhaps I’m giving them
too much credit, but if it was deliberate, it was a brilliant understanding of
psychology in Eve, which I’ve discussed before.

Worth noting, though, we were able to escape with our Sabre
and nearly all our pods, despite the fleet camping us in long after our
aggression timers ended (the only pod we lost was from one pilot who spawns on
the other side of the gate and couldn’t break free of the bubble before his
ship popped).Even after the welp, we
extracted what we could by chasing off the enemy Sabre and keeping our poise
when it came time to warp off.We kept
the “moment after welp” in mind by clearing the bubbles, not as much to free
our ship as to free our pods.

So, to sum up, positives and negatives throughout.Short of logging off in system (which I see
as a cowardly way to do it), we were always going to die.Had I shifted my expectation more quickly,
though, we might have been able to take more with us.

If you were with the enemy fleet, please post below whether
warping off your interceptors was a deliberate tactic to bait us into making a
run for it, or if you were simply splitting those intys up to try to find
us.I really want to know!

Sunday, December 22, 2013

I give Eve players a lot of credit when it comes to being
willing to fight.Now, I’ve mentioned before how faction warfare seems to be populated primarily with
risk-adverse button-orbiters, and we certainly come across our fair share during
our Friday night roams through FW low-sec.But we do find the occasional FW gang ready to defend their space, and
we also come across plenty of other pilots willing to fight us, both on gates
and in FW plexes.Sufficient numbers, as
it turns out, to make a routine thing of our Friday night roams.

Our Friday night roam was delayed until Saturday because of
some ::serious business:: of a non-logistic nature, but on Saturday, my wife
decided that she wanted to play, so she controlled the keyboard and I
instructed her, answered her questions, etc.So, Talvorian didn’t actually fly.

Things went very well.A couple times, I actually had to run up to take care of one of our
daughters, or go to the bathroom, or get another drink, and she only managed to
get lost once.All in all, not bad.She even got to choose the ship-naming
convention of the night.

I’ve mentioned before how I taught my wife to play Eve, and
I pointed out all the virtues of doing so.I’m happy to be able to give an example in real-time.

My wife and I have an arrangement.I get to stay up late and play Eve, but I
need to take care of them if they wake up in the middle of the night.In return, she’ll wake up with them whenever
they finally wake up in the morning, which is usually around 6:30, allowing me
to sleep in.

Yesterday morning, I awoke to find one daughter screaming
because my wife wouldn’t let her take all the ornaments off the Christmas tree,
and my wife getting ready to put the baby down for her nap.The first thing she said was to invoke that Eve knowledge:

Wednesday, December 18, 2013

I’ve FC’d a bit before, but the birth of my children made it
impossible for me to commit wholly to a fight.More frequently than not, I have to dock up while roaming because one
child or the other is up far later than she should be.Having no convenient gypsies to sell them to,
I have no choice but to be a good dad and sooth them.

But, I am experienced enough with FCing to know that it
takes an incredible amount of attention and focus to keep everything running
smoothly.Understanding what the
hostiles are doing, what your scouts are telling you, and how soon your fleet
is going to land, mixed with trying to remember exactly what bonuses a Celestis
gets so you can primary your targets in the right order… it’s a lot of work.

And, of course, you want to get on the kills yourself.Typically, the FC flies an easy-to-fly ship
(F1 only, please) that can endure for a while, but it’s still another set of
procedures to keep in mind.You need to
lock and broadcast every target, while also stating the target aloud on
comms.Then you need to choose the
secondary, then promote as the primary goes down, while still locking and
broadcasting.There are a lot of steps
to forget, particularly as the circumstances of the battle evolve.

Monday, December 16, 2013

After you’ve been playing Eve for a while, you start to
understand the fits pilots tend to use for each ship type.If you do exactly what everyone else is
doing, chances are the ships you can kill won’t engage you, while the ships
that can kill you will engage.The trick
to defeating a skilled pilot is to surprise him by deceptive fitting.

Generally, pilots tend to judge the success of their fight
against you by how quickly your shields or armor start to go down.Even if they know intellectually that they
aren’t doing much damage to you, they will get excited and commit to the fight
more if they see your hp bar drop quickly.

If you can convince them they’re doing better than they
really are, you’ll be able to lure them into a compromising situation.Bait ships do this by appearing to be all on
their own, and very often try to burn back to a gate in a feigned panic.The ancillary shield booster does a similar thing
in a different way.

When you fit your ship to accommodate an ASB, you tend to
ignore the amount of shield hit points in favor of the strength of your
resistances.If done correctly, you can
absorb the same amount of damage, but do so in a way that active shield
repairers give you more bang for their buck.On a Rapier or Vagabond, for instance, an x-large ASB can repair fully
50% of your shields with each cycle.

The psychological effect of this boost is devastating.Let me give you an example from our Friday
night low-sec roam.

Our fleet had warped to and entered a FW plex to fight some
frigates.I ended up on the outside by
myself with a hostile Wolf and Vexor.I
was flying an ASB-fit Rapier fit exactly as I mentioned above.Now, I only had one web on this fitting, as
well as two guns (one of my high slots had a probe launcher) and five Warrior
IIs.I had lost my typical 3/2
Hammerhead/Hobgoblin setup on another fight where we had to warp off, and found
the drones on the field of another battle.

As I locked them, I noticed that the Wolf had some shield
damage already, so I started with the assault frigate while I called for
back-up on comms.With a single web and
no scram, I could really only apply drone damage to the Wolf.If I had been in my usual Rapier fit
(dual-web, 3 guns, 3/2 drones), I could have taken out the Wolf quickly, then
gotten away from the Vexor.But as it
was, I was not fit for DPS, and quickly realized that I’d be in danger in a
minute or two down the road.

Now, I knew reinforcements would arrive eventually, but I
had to keep them both interested until it did.That’s where the ASB served me well.When the Wolf and Vexor got the first damage on me, my shield started to
go down faster than they expected – I had very little shield hp, but my resists
were all about 75%.At this point, the
Wolf committed fully to the engagement, moving in closer to slip under my guns.

He and the Vexor made the decision – after those first
couple shots – to commit fully to the engagement based on how quickly my shield
started to go down.Imagine their
surprise and sinking spirit when my ASB restored 50% of my shields with a
single stroke.

Had I simply been buffer-fit, I doubt the Wolf would have
engaged fully, and my fleet would have lost a kill.The Wolf had to quickly make a judgment based
on the visual cue of how my shields were dropping.In a split second, he didn’t have time to
think about potential dps for his ship, check the damage ticker coming in, or
ask his fleet mate how had he was hitting me.He simply saw that my shield was dropping, and concluded that they must
be winning.

And it ended up being the wrong decision.A deceptive fit resulted in a kill.Granted, the Vexor escaped, but that
sometimes happens when you only have one point fitted.

Always consider not only how your opponent is likely to be
fit, but also how your opponent expects you to be fit.Try to fit the same ship in different ways so
a quick check of your losses on eve-kill doesn’t reveal your one-and-only
fit.Few players will play the “I know
that he knows that I know that he knows” game very far, and you can gain a
significant advantage by luring people into fights they think they can win
easily.

We all head into fights with certain preconceptions.If you can understand your opponent’s, you
can turn them into weaknesses ripe for exploit.

And that’s how you win at Eve. Not necessarily by out-skilling your opponent, but by out-thinking him.

Sunday, December 15, 2013

If you haven’t had the chance yet, read The Mittani’s Goonswarm update.He spends a lot of time building narrative
and discussing Omegafleet, which you can honestly skip if you’re not actively involved
in the RUS war.

But in the middle, he touches on much of the history behind
why he and the leaders of the CFC are so eager to smash the faces of N3.Essentially, Goonswarm has been fighting the
same enemies time and again.The corp
tickers change, but the characters themselves remain the same.

This gets me thinking about the nature of null-sec iterative
cycle.Goonswarm and allies fight BOB,
Goonswarm wins.BOB turns into someone
else who’s still butt-hurt about Goonswarm fighting them, and the cycle
repeats.Roughly the same enemies, roughly
the same sides, just different regions.The only reason the fleet doctrines change is because of mechanics.

Having read a number of blogs and news sites, you’ve
probably noticed that there are clear differences among the tones and writing
styles of various bloggers, and they run the gamut on a number of spectrums:
witty-dry, serious-funny, sophisticated-juvenile, realistic-biased.

When I started writing this blog, I honestly didn’t expect
to cultivate a particular style.The way
I write here is the way I write all my fiction.Granted, each genre and type of writing has its own conventions, and I
tend to stick to those when appropriate, but tone, voice, and pace are pretty
consistent.

But there are a few intentional choices I made.One of those was my desire to include within
each of my posts something that a reader could take away to make his or her Eve
experience richer.That might mean a
lesson that they could emulate, a mistake I made that they can avoid, or a way
of thinking about the game contrary to the way they normally do.

Just a quick note; I apologize for not posting recently, but
real life has taken over quite a bit this week.It’s looking like it’s letting up a little, and I’m working on four
posts I’ll be posting in rapid succession, so stay tuned for the next day or so
and set aside some reading time (bathroom, fleet, or otherwise).I’ll have two theory posts, one Lesson, and
one insight on a good method of deception.

Monday, December 9, 2013

Eve is a game we all spend large amounts of time
playing.Quite often, our significant
others (henceforth shortened to “wives” for ease) simply don’t understand how
important internet pixels really are.We
strive, often in vain, to help explain that yes, we really did need to stay up
until 3 a.m. to participate in that fleet fight, and that no, we aren’t wearing
the headset just to ignore them.

At some point, we all ask ourselves, “What if I taught my
wife to play Eve?”Visions of our lives
becoming easier through domestic simpatico pass through our minds.This was exactly the question I asked myself
about a year ago.

Saturday, December 7, 2013

For those of you who read my “Lessons” posts to learn
something new (and all of you really should), this post will be a little more
esoteric, but I’ll still cover both a general axiom and some specific examples
from last night’s fleet.

When fighting small gangs or solo pilots, being able
to predict your opponent’s decisions is very important.But another way psychology comes into play in
Eve is in having the resolution of spirit to stick with a stratagems so long as
it’s appropriate to do so, even if it doesn’t seem to bear fruit. That’s called
patience.You want to have better
resolve than the other guy, and force him to become impatient first.

In Razor, we have an FC named Qicia who routinely gets
us high-value kills.He’ll wait until
the optimal moment to call in the fleet.He’s very patient, and he knows intuitively when the perfect time to act
is.He may see dreads land and enter
siege.He may be running a bait
character and choose the right moment to light that cyno.Some people complain that his fleets can be
long, but he’s very good at what he does.He demonstrates an essential, yet rare, characteristic.

And that trait is patience, which leads to good timing.Yes, I’ll connect the two of them.

Wednesday, December 4, 2013

A few months ago, I purchased a new character with the
intention of placing her in a corp that specialized in small gang roaming.I was targeting small US TZ corporations who
roamed through PvP-rich environments.I
wasn’t ready to go full pirate (read: -10.0 sec status, ever to set foot in
high-sec again) and didn’t quite have the skills trained up to go wormhole
(scanning and T3s), so I was looking closely at the corporations that fought in
Curse and Syndicate.

As an added treat, they would have to be fine with two of my
characters still remaining in Razor.And
because of that affiliation, I didn’t want to join another CFC alliance, and
our enemies were pretty much out, too.While some might unknowingly accept an alt of a CFC player, if they did,
they wouldn’t be as sharp and on-the-ball as I wanted.

Believe it or not, it’s an incredibly tough task.The US time zone is smaller than EU, but
there are still a lot of opportunities out there.I was impressed with Rote Kapelle, but having
characters in other alliances was a deal-breaker.

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